Ed McBain_Matthew Hope 12

by Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear

  “Why were you expecting him to call?”

  “To tell me how it had gone.”

  “How what had gone?”

  “His meeting with Lainie. He asked her to come to the boat so he could offer a solution to our problem.”

  “By problem…”

  “Her suit for a permanent injunction.”

  “What was the nature of this solution, can you tell me, Mrs. Toland?”

  “He offered to buy her off.”

  “Buy her off?”

  “He offered a cash settlement if she would drop her claim.”

  “A cash settlement?” I said, surprised.

  “Yes. Five thousand dollars.”

  “Are you saying your husband offered Ms. Commins…?”

  “I don’t know if he actually ever made the offer. She may have shot him first, for all I know. I never saw him again after he left the house, you see. Or spoke to him, for that matter. But that’s what he was planning, yes. That’s what he and I had discussed.”

  “You’d discussed offering Ms. Commins five thousand dollars if she’d drop her infringement claim.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you and your husband discuss any other possible offer?”

  “No. Well, the price, yes. We were trying to determine how much she was going for. But there was never any doubt in our mind that she’d agree to a cash settlement.”

  “You didn’t, for example, discuss manufacturing Ms. Commins’s bear yourself and…”

  “No.”

  “…and compensating her by way of a substantial advance against generous royalties?”

  “Why would we do that? She designed the bear while she was working for us. In fact, the bear was Brett’s idea. And we have a witness to prove it.”

  “What witness?” I said at once. “You offered no witnesses at the…”

  “Brett remembered only later.”

  “Remembered what?”

  “That Bobby Diaz was there.”

  “Who’s Bobby Diaz?”

  “Our design chief. He was there.”

  “Where?”

  “In Brett’s office. When he first told Lainie about his idea for a cross-eyed bear.”

  “When was this?”

  “Last September.”

  “And your husband remembered it only after the hearing?

  “Yes. In fact, that’s what prompted him to invite Lainie to the boat last Tuesday night.”

  “To make an offer of a cash settlement.”

  “Yes. Because now we had a witness.”

  “Did you tell this is your attorney?”

  “We planned to. If Lainie didn’t accept the offer.”

  “So, as I understand this, at eleven-forty you were waiting at home for your husbands phone call…”

  “Yes. To learn whether she’d accepted the offer or turned it down.”

  “Did you think she might actually accept such an offer?”

  “Brett and I were confident she would.”

  “An offer of five thousand dollars to drop…”

  “The bear was ours,” Etta said simply. “We have a witness.”

  “Did your husband, in fact, call you at any time that night?” I asked.

  “No,” Etta said. “My husband was being murdered by Lainie Commins that night.”

  I let that go by.

  “Did you try to reach him at any time that night?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “By telephone.”

  “You called the boat?”

  “Yes. Well, the cellular phone number. There’s a cellular phone on the boat.”

  “At what time did you call the boat?”

  “Eleven forty-five? Around then. I was ready for bed, in fact. When I didn’t hear from Brett, I thought something might be wrong. So I called the boat.”

  “And?”

  “I got no answer.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “I got dressed and drove to the club.”

  “Why?”

  “It wasn’t like Brett not to call when he said he would.”

  “Did you think the meeting might still be going on?”

  “I didn’t know what to think.”

  “How long did it take you to get to the club?”

  “Ten, fifteen minutes?”

  “Just for clarification,” I said, “by ‘the club,’ I’m assuming you mean the Silver Creek Yacht Club.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where you keep your boat.”

  “Yes.”

  “What time did you get there, Mrs. Toland?”

  “A quarter past twelve.”

  “How do you know what time it was?”

  “I looked at the dashboard clock just as I was nearing the club.”

  “How’d you happen to do that?”

  “I knew it was late, I guess I was wondering if they could still be on the boat discussing the offer. I guess I wanted to know just how late it actually was.”

  “Is the clock in your car a digital clock?”

  “No. It has hands.”

  “Then you can’t say exactly what time it was, can you?”

  “It might have been a minute or so later.”

  “Twelve-sixteen, would you say? Twelve-seventeen?”

  “More like twelve-sixteen.”

  “You said earlier that you hadn’t heard from your husband since he’d left the house…”

  “That’s right.”

  “What time was that?”

  “Around eight.”

  “Are you aware that he called Ms. Commins at nine? From the boat?”

  “Yes, he said he was going to.”

  “Didn’t call her from the house, is that right?”

  “No. Said he wanted to call from the boat.”

  “Why?”

  “Lend urgency to it. Tell her he was already on the boat, ask her to meet him there, discuss a solution calmly and sensibly.”

  “Didn’t ask you to come along?”

  “No. He didn’t want it to seem we were ganging up on her.”

  “So he left the house at eight…”

  “Yes.”

  “And this was now sixteen minutes past twelve as you were approaching the club…”

  “Yes, the big stone pillars at the club’s entrance.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “I made a right turn in front of the restaurant, where the driveway swings around the oval there, and I headed for the marina parking lot.”

  “Toward the booth there at the entrance to the lot?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was there anyone in the booth at that hour?”

  “No.”

  “Were there any lights on in the booth?”

  “No. Listen, let’s just get to it, okay?”

  Frank raised his eyebrows.

  I looked surprised.

  “Get to what?” I asked.

  “Your client,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, what…”

  “Elaine Commins,” she said. “In her little white Geo. Racing past that booth and out of the parking lot.”

  My heart sank.

  I was silent for a moment. Helen Hampton kept watching the tape recorder. Sidney Brackett sat with his arms folded across his chest.

  “You just said there weren’t any lights on in…”

  “There were lights outside.”

  “Where?”

  “Hanging on either side of the booth.”

  “Overhead lights?”

  “I saw her.”

  “Even though…”

  “I saw her! It was Lainie. I looked her dead in the eye as she went flying out of that lot. Lainie Commins. Fresh from killing my husband!”

  “Did you know he was dead at the time?”

  This from my partner Frank, who’d been silent until this moment.

  “No, I did not know he was dead.”

  “No one had yet informed you…”

  “Of course
not!”

  “…that your husband was dead?”

  “No.”

  “Then you had no reason to assume, even if you did actually see Ms. Commins driving out of that lot…”

  “Oh, I saw her, all…”

  “…that she’d killed your husband, isn’t that right?”

  “Until I found him, do you mean?”

  She said this quite sweetly, nailing Frank right between the eyes. No, she was saying, I had no reason to connect a woman racing from the scene of a crime until I’d actually found the scene of the crime. But we are coming to that, counselors. Just keep asking your dumb questions, and we will slowly but inexorably get to my husband Brett Toland with two bullets in his head.

  Wish to or not, we had to hear it.

  “Can you tell us what happened next?” I asked.

  What happened next…

  And next…

  And next…

  And next…

  …was that she’d driven her car to a parking spot facing slip number five, where Toy Boat was tied up, and she got out of the car and walked up the gangway to the boat, calling her husband’s name because there were lights on in the saloon and she figured he might be down there, though she had no idea at the time that he might be down there dead.

  Far out on the water, she can hear a buoy’s foghorn moaning to the night. The wooden ladder creaks under her weight as she takes the four steps down into the saloon with its Oriental rugs and its paisley-covered couches and glass-fronted lockers and Currier & Ives prints, walks through the saloon and past the closed door to the head on her right, and down the passageway into the master stateroom.

  She does not see her husband at first.

  What she sees at once is a gun on the bed.

  Blue-black against the white bedspread.

  She knows this gun, it is her husband’s. But it is odd that he would leave it here in plain sight on the bed, and besides…

  Where is he?

  “Brett?” she calls.

  And sees him in that instant.

  Lying on his back, on the carpet, on the deck, on the far side of the bed.

  He is naked.

  A white towel is draped open around his waist.

  His face is covered with blood.

  He is red with blood.

  Quite calmly…

  She is amazed that she does not scream.

  Quite calmly, she lifts the cellular phone from where it is resting on one of the cabinets, and quite calmly dials 911 to report that she has just discovered her husband murdered aboard their yacht.

  Her watch reads twenty minutes past midnight.

  The police arrive five minutes later.

  If anyone in Calusa needs confirmation that the crime business here is in very good health, thanks, all he has to do is take a quick glimpse at what was once called the Public Safety Building. The old tan brick facade of the building is still there, but in place of the discreet lettering that had announced the police facility in the dear dead demure days, there are now bigger, bolder, bronze letters informing the public in no uncertain terms that this is the home of:

  CALUSA

  POLICE

  HEADQUARTERS

  The day was hot and still. There seemed to be even less wind than was normal for September. It has always struck me as odd that the school year down here starts in August, when a person can wilt just stepping out of bed. September is no picnic, either. Sultry is perhaps the best word to describe September in Calusa, although at night cool breezes often blew in off the Gulf. It rained a lot in September. You expected the rain to cool things off, but no, all it did was cause steam to rise momentarily from the sidewalks. Tourists knew what Florida was like in the wintertime, but year-round residents knew the real Florida. Sometimes in September, when the days got steamy and sullen, an alligator waddling up Main Street wouldn’t have surprised anyone. September in Florida was what Florida was all about.

  There were no alligators coming up Main Street on that hot and sunny morning of September eighteenth. I walked past the pittosporum bushes lining the sidewalk in front of the police facility, and glanced up, as I usually did, at the very narrow windows resembling rifle slits in a fortress wall. But there were no snipers behind them because they were designed for protection against heat rather than siege. Where once a person walked through a pair of dark bronze doors into an open space containing only a reception desk with a young woman behind it, there was now a metal detector unit with an armed Calusa P.D. blue standing to the right of it and another one sitting at a desk behind it. The one behind the desk conducted a hands-on search of my briefcase. He also asked who I wanted to see, and called upstairs to make sure I was expected.

  Upstairs is where the real changes have taken place. On the third floor, the old orange-colored letter elevator is gone, a victim of high-tech delivery systems. The old somewhat cozy reception area has been enlarged to some four times its original size, and transformed into a bustling space that resembles a warship’s battle room, with computer terminals beeping and blinking, phones ringing, civil service employees mingling with P.D. blues and plain-clothes cops in a frantic boil resembling a famous borrowed television show. A bank of four elevators is on the entrance wall. The other three walls have more doors in them than a bedroom farce, constantly opening and closing, people coming and going in handcuffs or without.

  Where earlier there had been no need for what in bigger cities is called a detention cage, there is now a rather large so-called Conditioning Unit, which makes the cell sound like a brainwashing center, but staid, sedate Calusa has never quite admitted to itself that crime is as rampant here as it is anyplace else in the United States. Calusa would rather believe that the miscreants dragged into this facility day and night are not “criminals” in the strictest sense but merely misguided souls who’ve somehow fallen afoul of the law and must be temporarily “conditioned” until the matter can be straightened out.

  This morning, there were half a dozen recently arrested individuals in the C.U., as the huge cage was euphemistically called. One of them was a black woman wearing pink satin shorts, a red bikini bra, and red high-heeled shoes. I imagined she’d been picked up for soliciting sex on US. 41, near the airport. The other five people in the cage were men, three of them black, two of them white. The biggest of the black men was obviously drunk and kept shouting to anyone who’d listen that he wasn’t no African American, damn it! He was a plain ole American same as anyone else born in this country.

  “Do I look like I drink goat’s milk and blood? You see flies eatin my eyes, man? Fuck Africa!” he shouted to me as I went by. “You hear me? Fuck Africa!”

  One of the white men said, “Fuck you, man!” and then threw a finger at me when he realized I wasn’t the detective, lawyer, or state attorney he was waiting for. Nobody else paid any attention to me.

  I found Morris Bloom in his office at the far end of the corridor.

  “Got yourself another winner, I see,” he said, and grinned and extended his hand.

  I told him I thought Lainie Commins was innocent.

  He said, “Sure.”

  I told him Pete Folger had already offered me a deal.

  “What has he got, Morrie?”

  “Is this on the record?”

  “He suggested I talk to his grand jury witnesses.”

  “Well, I was one of them,” Bloom said, nodding.

  “Can we talk?”

  “No tape.”

  “However.”

  “Sure”

  In every man’s life, there are two cowboys who once beat him up and taught him the meaning of fear. I keep expecting my particular cowboys to show up again one day, to pay me back for what Bloom taught me to do to them. That is the kind of thing cowboys never forget. So one day I’m sure they’ll be waiting around the next corner. In fact, when those bullets came banging out of that parked car last April, I thought it might have been my cowboys coming to get me at last. I can tell you this. I will never
be able to repay Detective Morris Bloom for what he taught me to do. What he taught me to do was almost kill them.

  The walls of his office pretty much told the story of his life. Resting on a shelf was a boxing trophy he’d won while serving in the United States Navy. Hanging on one of the walls were a pair of laminated front-page stories from the New York Daily News and Long Island’s Newsday, headlining the daring capture of two bank robbers in Mineola, Long Island, by a young police officer named Morris Bloom. Hanging on another wall were several framed photographs of the detective squad he’d subsequently commanded up north, together with a citation plaque from the Nassau County chief of detectives. On yet another shelf was a Snoopy doll his then-nineteen-year-old son had given him on a Father’s Day some years back, the hand-lettered sign around its neck reading: To the best bloodhound in the world. Love, Marc. A framed picture of Bloom’s wife Arlene, a smiling dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty, rested on his desk alongside a humidor of Cuban cigars he offered to rank but never smoked himself.

  A heavyset man in his mid-forties, an inch over six feet tall and weighing either side of two hundred pounds, depending on how many pizzas he’d had this week, he stood waiting for my first question. There was a look of ineffable sadness on his face, as though he were certain my case was already a lost cause. But the look, exaggerated by shaggy black brows and soulful brown eyes, was always there, a bad failing for a cop. Arms folded across his chest, he waited. He was a blunt, plainspoken man. I knew there’d be no bullshit in this office today.

  “Etta Toland says that you and Cooper Rawles were the first detectives to respond when the blues called in a homicide.”

  “That’s right,” Bloom said.

  “What time did you get to the boat, Morrie?”

  “Twenty to one.”

  “Can you tell me what you found?”

  “Sector patrol car angle-parked into the walk running past the boats, I think it was Charlie Car, it’s in the report. Patrol sergeant’s car was alongside it, also angle-parked. Coop and I were driving one of the squad’s sedans, we parked alongside the sergeant’s car, his driver still behind the wheel. His name’s Brannigan, he’s supervisor in Sector Three. He took me to where the victim’s wife…”

  “Etta Toland.”

  “Yeah, was sitting in this little sort of outdoor…I don’t know boats, Matthew, I don’t know what the hell you call it. A little outside area with a table and banquettes around it, what looked like banquettes.”